AWS Touts Sharp Spike in Database Migrations

Despite being generally available for less than a year, Amazon Web Services' Database Migration Service (DMS) is proving to be a key growth area for the cloud giant.

DMS, which AWS first introduced at its 2015 re:Invent conference, lets organizations migrate their databases to the AWS cloud with minimal downtime and at a low cost. It enables both homogeneous and heterogeneous database migrations. Supported databases include its own Amazon Aurora database, as well as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SAP ASE. As of last July, the service can also be used for continuous data replication.

AWS released DMS to general availability last March after a five-month beta period. At that time, the company said that DMS had already been used to move over 1,000 databases to the cloud. Just a month later, that tally stood at 2,000 database migrations, according to AWS' Q1 2016 financial report.

By the end of 2016, however, DMS use had apparently skyrocketed to roughly 16,000 migrations to date. AWS CEO Andy Jassy shared the new number in a Tweet late last month:

16K database migrations via AWS Database Migration Service in 2016...2K in last month since #AWS#Reinvent. DB freedom is a powerful thing.

Jassy didn't elaborate on what factors might have driven that spike, particularly the end-of-the-year surge after re:Invent, which took place in early December. AWS unveiled a slew of new services at re:Invent, as is typical, but the announcements were mainly focused on other parts of its cloud platform, not particularly on its database services.

However, AWS has been touting the success of its database products for some time now. The company said last year that its Amazon Aurora database engine and Amazon Redshift data warehouse service are the fastest-growing products in its history.

Jassy's Tweet capped off a year of accelerated competition between AWS and database giant Oracle, which last fall announced a shift toward a more cloud-focused strategy and a goal to challenge AWS in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space.

About the Author

Gladys Rama is the senior site producer for RCPmag.com and senior editor of AWSInsider.net.